The Problem With Preachers

I hate to break it to the country, but we have become a nation of rubes and cheap marks who should not be trusted to go to market with the egg money lest we return with a bag of magic beans. We have allowed our politics — and one of the only two political parties we allow ourselves — to be hijacked by a kind of religiosity that depends on its adherents being even bigger suckers than the rest of their fellow citizens. This is going to come as a shock, I know, to the people who insist that we find "common ground" with the Bible-bashers, or to people like His Eminence, Cardinal Douthat, of The New York Times, who maintain there is something actually spiritual in the political ambitions of the Jeebus-drunk masses on the starboard side of the aisle, but they're all about power — specifically, the power than can be gained by the public exercise of their massed personal paranoias. It has been a wonder to behold.

Recently, the Barna Group, which tracks such things,released the results of a poll it has taken among evangelical American Christians, the splinter of American Protestantism that has amassed so much power that even the Clan Of The Red Beanie, with a millennium-and-a-half head start, is jealous of how far they've come. The poll revealed that nobody has fallen so hard for the long con of evangelical politics as the people who thought they were in on the game. They are worried about "religious liberty." They also would like "religious liberty" defined as religions of which they approve.

Many Americans express significant angst over the state of religious freedom in the U.S. Slightly more than half of adults say they are very (29%) or somewhat (22%) concerned that religious freedom in the U.S. will become more restricted in the next five years. As might be expected, those who are religious are more concerned than those who aren't-particularly Christians more so than those adherents to other faiths. Practicing Protestants (46% very concerned) are more worried about this prospect than others; yet, 30% of practicing Catholics are also concerned. Barna-defined evangelicals, who meet a series of nine theological criteria, are among the most likely to be concerned about such restrictions (71%). Not only are most Americans worried about the future of religious freedom, many feel the restraints have already started. One-third of adults believe religious freedoms have grown worse in the last decade. Among practicing Protestants, nearly half (48%) say they perceive freedom of religion to have grown worse in recent years. Three out of five evangelicals (60%) perceive religious freedoms to have grown worse.

Except, ahem...

Though most Americans agree religious freedoms should be granted to people of all faiths, there are still a significant number of people (23%) who believe traditional Judeo-Christian values should be given preference in the public square. The majority, though, would disagree: two-thirds of Americans (66%) say there's no one set of values that should dominate the country and another 11% of adults declined or gave another response. Practicing Catholics (24%) are about on par with the national average, while practicing Protestants (35%) and evangelicals (54%) are above average in selecting traditional Judeo-Christian values.

Of course, they are.

More than half the evangelicals surveyed want to protect the liberty of the religion they practice. This reminds me of the wonderful quote from Kirk Fordyce, who was once an eccentric governor of Mississippi even by the standards of eccentric governors of Mississippi. He referred to "our Christian heritage" and, when asked if he meant to say "Judeo-Christian," thundered in reply, "If I'd'a meant 'Judeo,' I'd'a said, 'Judeo.'" This attitude dovetails quite neatly with the other findings of the survey in which this same overly influential bloc of voters defines the things with which they disagree as threats to their liberty, which is not exactly the way the marketplace of ideas is supposed to operate.

If most Americans agree religious liberties are being restricted, there is much less consensus on why that shift is taking place. More than half of Americans (57%) believe "religious freedom has become more restricted in the U.S. because some groups have actively tried to move society away from traditional Christian values." As might be expected, this opinion is again more common among practicing Catholics (62%) and Protestants (76%) and is nearly a universal perception among evangelicals (97%). Specifically, about three in 10 Americans (31%) say, "the gay and lesbian community is the most active group trying to remove Christian values from the country." This perception is embraced by half of practicing Protestants (42%), one-third of practicing Catholics (32%), and three-quarters of evangelicals (72%). By comparison, people of a faith other than Christianity (16%) and religiously unaffiliated adults (11%) were much less likely to embrace this viewpoint.

I'm sorry, but, generally speaking, "Stuff is happening that I don't like" does not constitute a threat to your liberty. Gay people don't want to remove Christian values from the country. Except where it impacts their daily lives, they don't care if you worship a frog's head of a Sunday. They just want to get married and serve in the Army. And if equal protection under the secular law is really a threat to your religious liberty, then both your religion and your liberty are made of spun sugar and you should shop around for a most robust variety of both of them.

That we have allowed this kind of transparent nonsense to poison our politics is not entirely the fault of the politicians who exploit it, or even of the wagonloads of suckers who believe it. The fault lies with the preachers who peddle paranoia instead of the gospels, who tell the people comfortably ensconced every Sunday in the sprawling religious compounds that their towering megachurch is really an embattled outpost in the barbarian country of Fabuloustan.

The Righteous Remnant malarkey largely has been an easy con at least since Constantine first enlisted Christianity in the service of an empire. In the context of the United States, where religion is more free — and, let it be said, more profitable — than anywhere else in the world, it is utterly transparent, and it is destructive to the genuinely devout. It convinces them that their faith is so delicate, so shallow that the transitory enthusiasms of politics can put that faith at risk. It In the gospels, The Founder himself tells us that the gates of hell will not prevail against his Church. That being said, Barney Frank's wedding doesn't seem like much of a threat.

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